Who Killed the Killer Drone - and Why?

Who Killed the Killer Drone - and Why?
In November, with great fanfare, the U.S. Navy and Air Force took over Darpa's biggest, most promising killer drone program, Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems, or J-UCAS. The idea was to develop a single family of weaponized drones operating from land and from carrier decks, backing up and ultimately replacing manned fighter jets. According to Dr. Michael S. Francis, J-UCAS Director, the program promised "a transformational shift in the operational application of airpower in the 21st century combat environment." Two months later, the 2007 defense budget split the program into separate Air Force and Navy programs. J-UCAS was dead. "We start joint, but we never carry it across the goal line for some reason," Rear Adm. Timothy Heely told Aviation Week after the decision was announced. I'm on the UAV beat for National Defense. In recent weeks I've spoken to many Air Force and Navy UAV program managers and operators -- and none have given me a straight answer on why J-UCAS went extinct. Janes has an idea: The Air Force and Navy drifted further and further apart on what their unmanned combat planes (the X-45 and X-47, respectively) should do. The gap got so wide, the one-size-fits-all approach stopped making sense. [The] USAF decided that its present conception no longer met that service's long-term needs. USAF ambitions are for a long-range strike aircraft embracing stealth, endurance, ISR [or Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] and attack capabilities, and, while the projected [J-UCAS vehicle] clearly offered the first and last of these, there was seen to be a mismatch between the aircraft's range/endurance and its modest 4,500 lb weapon load. Janes is on to something. A few weeks ago, somebody leaked Air Force plans to fold its half of the former J-UCAS program into its Long-Range Strike study, which is looking at ways to replace B-1s, B-2s and B-52s. Air Force Magazine explains: [Long-Range Strike] would replace the Joint Unmanned Combat Aircraft System--slated for termination--with a larger, faster unmanned bomber. The aircraft would have to cover very long distances and be able to loiter in the target area with a good-sized bomb load. Note that "good-sized bomb load" part. Last week, Navy Capt. Steven Wright told me that the Navy wanted J-UCAS not for strategic bombing, but initially for penetrating ISR and, later, for close air support -- both missions that require smallish, fast, medium-range aircraft like today's manned F/A-18s. Air Force again: The qualities the Air Force wanted in a next-generation strike aircraft were trending toward a larger and larger platform, equipped with a sizable bomb load and able to loiter in enemy territory for long periods, with periodic refuelings from a tanker. The size of the objective Air Force version of J-UCAS had been upped several times, and likely would have been enlarged again. And that meant parting ways with the Navy and its smaller, tactical armed drone. Defense Tech sources have another theory: that the Air Force killed its combat drone, Boeing's X-45, to keep it from competing with its manned fighter jet of the future, the Joint Strike Fighter. The reason that was given (strictly off the record) [by Air Force officials] was that we were expected to be simply too good in key areas and that we would have caused massive disruption to the efforts to "keep… JSF sold." If we had flown and things like survivability had been evenly assessed on a small scale and Congress had gotten ahold of the data, JSF would have been in serious trouble. And what was this shocking data? Say the mission is to take out a SAM [surface-to-air missile] site using a Small Diameter Bomb. That SDB has the same standoff launch max range regardless of the platform releasing it. Given that the state of the art for Low Observable (LO) design and material is much the same between the qualified aircraft designers in the U.S., how LO your system is largely a function of shape and cross section. Compare the shapes and profiles of the F-35 [JSF] and the X-45C. Who do you think is going to have the higher probably of being killed? Of course that "kill" in the JSF case means body bags and in the case of a X-45C, just the lost aircraft and far fewer of them. The Navy's Capt. Wright says that both the X-45 and X-47 J-UCAS demonstrators will continue development under the Navy UCAS program. Carrier trials are expected in 2011. Meanwhile, the Air Force will start from scratch or piggyback its UCAS/Long-Range Strike vehicle on an existing classified platform, perhaps the one mentioned by David Hambling here a few weeks back. For more, check out Noah's January post on how the killer drone program got bumped off. UPDATE 5:40 PM: Not everyone in the Defense Department is sold on the idea of turning J-UCAS into a strike plane -- or on the idea of the new aircraft, period. As Inside Defense notes, "Internal squabbling between two camps within the Pentagon is delaying the formal start of a study aimed at helping the Air Force shape its effort to field a new long-range bomber." May 8, 2006

Naval Robot Wars

Naval Robot Wars
A new report drafted by the well-connected Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments makes a strong case for an accelerated development of unmanned combat aircraft for carrier battle groups. With a simple equation, Tom Ehrhard and Robert Work of CSBA lay out the benefits of UCASs for the CVW, saying the increase in range and stealth drones bring to the maritime strike fight are inarguable... The logic supporting accelerated development of a carrier-based UCAS is straight-forward. Using manned aircraft, current CVWs are optimized to strike targets at ranges between 200 to 450 nautical miles (nm) from their carriers. Moreover, carrier aircraft lack persistence. That is to say, they are limited to missions no more than ten hours long, and they more typically fly missions that last only a few hours. In contrast, a carrier-based UCAS could mount strikes out to 1,500 nm from a carrier without refueling. Just as importantly, because its mission duration is not limited by human endurance, with aerial refueling a UCAS will be able to stay airborne for 50 to 100 hours — five to ten times longer than a manned aircraft. In other words, with multiple aerial refuelings, a UCAS could establish persistent surveillance-strike combat air patrols (CAPs) at ranges well beyond 3,000 nm, and strike point targets at far longer ranges. Ehrhard, a former Air Force officer who wrote his PhD thesis on UAVs, and Work, a former Marine artillery officer and one of the sharpest minds in amphibious warfare development, are adamant that the Navy not fall victim to its usual manned-fighter biases and deprive the UCAS program of the funding it needs to keep on track. They contend the future of the CVW will be undercut if carrier-based UAV development is sidelined and call on Congress to step in and marshal the program through the sea service. With the many competing programs now fighting for the attention of naval aviators—not to mention the Navy’s historical ambivalence regarding unmanned aircraft systems—there is a danger that the UCAS-D program will suffer in DoN budget deliberations and be progressively delayed. If this happens, the long-term operational and tactical effectiveness of the US carrier fleet may be at risk. Congress and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) should therefore take a direct interest in fostering this program and monitoring its progress. Work and Erhard understand the arguments against UCAS programs, including the complexity of integrating a drone with manned aircraft on the flight deck and banking on unreliable technology with so many competing fiscal priorities like shipbuilding. But both analysts say the Navy’s participation in aerial robot wars will make them more relevant in the future and keep the Air Force from passing the carrier strike group by on the way to the fight. The bottom line is this: the N-UCAS’s unique combination of great unrefueled range and dramatically improved endurance and stealth could transform US aircraft carriers and their embarked air wings from operational strike systems with outstanding global mobility and relatively limited tactical reach and persistence into globally mobile, long-range persistent surveillance strike systems effective across multiple 21st century security challenges. To make this potentially revolutionary transformation possible, Congress, OSD, and the Navy must take the necessary first step and support both an expanded N-UCAS carrier demonstration program and technology maturation effort to safely integrate these unmanned surveillance/strike systems into carrier flight deck and strike operations.